Global DDoS Report: CryptoCurrency Growing As A Target As Chinese Botnet Activity Doubles

Imperva recently released its Q4 2017 Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report, a statistical analysis of over five thousand DDoS attacks mitigated by the firm during Q4 2017.

Key findings include in the report include:

1. Cryptocurrency is becoming a top target – Despite being a relative newcomer to the world, cryptocurrency ranked as the industry with the fifth most Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks targeting the firm’s customers in Q4 of 2017 – ahead of financial services which was sixth. Some of the increase is likely connected to the rise in Bitcoin’s value late in the year coupled with the near tripling in the number of cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide within a period of just 3 months to nearly 200.

2. Botnet activity out of China doubled in Q4 2017 – While it is not surprising that China continues to be the source a growing number of DDoS attacks, the report noted that the US and Vietnam – the other two nations leading the world in DDoS attacks – saw their attack footprint decrease in Q4, while botnet traffic emanating from China more than doubled.

3. Targets in the United States were hit with the majority of application-level attacks – Parties in the United States were on the receiving end of more than three-quarters of all application-layer assaults, a steep increase from just-over-half last quarter. Coming in at a distant second and third were Israel and Singapore at about 16% and 2% of attacks. At the network layer, the biggest three targets were Hong Kong, the USA, and Taiwan, which accounted for about 1/3, 1/5, and 1/6 of attacks respectively.

4. Application Layer Attacks Double And Grow More Persistent, as Network Level Attacks Subside – As Application-layer assaults increased 43 percent over their Q3 levels, from an average of 135 per week in Q3 to 237 per week in Q4, network-layer attacks fell by more than 50 percent since last quarter. Both types of attacks, however, grew increasingly persistent. Almost 2/3 of application level attacks were repeat attacks.

(For full disclosure: I am the Chief Security Advisor at Gladius, which is leveraging blockchain technology to revolutionize the way the world both accelerates the delivery of content over the Internet and combats DDoS attacks.)